Bilder on the Historiography of Judical Review

Idea or Practice: A Brief Historiography of Judicial Review is a new article by Mary Sarah Bilder, Boston College Law School, published in a symposium on constitutional law in the Journal of Policy History noted earlier in this blog. Here is the abstract:

Judicial review may be the most publicly contested aspect of American constitutionalism. The conventional beliefs that judicial review should be understood as an idea and American constitutionalism studied as a new rationalistic, political science are largely due to the influential scholarship of Edward Corwin [pictured at right]. This brief essay recovers the pre-Corwin discussion about the origins of judicial review to demonstrate the way in which the approach to judicial review as an idea has been, itself, historically constructed by scholarly inclination, disciplinary identification, and the availability of historical materials